Google News Archive - go back 200 years

Over the weekend Garrett Rodgers noticed a list of new set of domains registered by Google including the word 'archive', leading him to speculate on some possbile new services in the near future, something along the lines of the WayBackMachine:

"If I am on the wrong track with the web archive, another possibility for a service named "Google Archive Search" would be one where you could search for historic articles from things like newspapers and magazines. Also don't forget the deal that was made with the Associated Press — it could have something to do with these domains also."

According to the BBC, it looks like Garrett got it right with his second guess as you can now use Google News Archive Search to search digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning, wait for it: the last 200 years:

"People using the search are shown results from both free and subscription-based news outlets.

Partners in the project include the websites of US newspaper the New York Times and the Guardian from the UK.

Other sources include news aggregators, websites which collect and display news stories from multiple sources."

"The Lords: Spent most of the week hotly debating the blank check His Majesty's Government gave to Germany to violate the Treaty of Versailles in return for Adolf Hitler's promise to keep his navy at 35% of Britain's (TIME, June 24)."

"While the interface is similar to Google News, the new layout is focused on time. The key intervals for a search are marked with an arrow, and there's also a timeline view that shows the most interesting news from each computer-generated interval."

"Google would not state how many publishers were taking part in the new service…but has announced a number of partners including WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale."